Dr. Thomson — andhis Jnswer. 341 



any or all of your combustibles.*" These questions seem to 

 have nettled the Doctor. Let him bring order out of his own 

 confusion at his leisure. It is not our affair. 



We are glad to see his recantation, however awkward, relative 

 to his treatment of Sir H. Davy's electrical discoveries ; the 

 merit of which, however, is too eminent to be tarnished by the 

 Doctor's breath, and too splendid to need the varnish of his stile. 



Dr. Thomson has nineteen pages in his System, on combus- 

 tion ; the first sixteen of which we again assert are absolute and 

 unmeaning verbiage; and in the remaining three, he has contrived 

 to turn into " caput mortuum" of his own, one of the most inter- 

 esting memoirs of modern science. Yet he has the assurance to 

 say, " I have given, I conceive, all the important additions to 

 our knowledge of flame contained in Davy's paper." If he will 

 look into the article combustion in the dictionary of chemistry, 

 published about the same time with his sixth edition, he will 

 tind a multitude of important facts, drawn from Sir H. Davy's 

 Memoirs on Flame, of which there is no trace in his all-perfect 

 System. 



Under chlorine in his System, he says of M.M. Gay-Lussac and 

 Thenard, " they shewed that the opinion, that oxymuriatic acid 

 contains no oxygen, might be supported ; but, at the same time, 

 assigned their reasons for considering the old opinion as well 

 founded. An abstract of these important experiments had 

 been pubhshed however in 1809; these experiments drew the 

 attention of Sir H. Davy to the subject." In our Review, the 

 clearest evidence was adduced that Sir H. Davy's attention had 

 been drawn to the subject of muriatic acid, long before these 

 eminent French chemists had published their experiments. In 

 his answer he perverts as usual the drift of our animadversions, 

 to suit his private purpose. On this occasion he is driven to 

 the necessity of citing his well-known sarcasm, against thatac- 

 comphshed and amiable philosopher, M. Gay-Lussac, which he 

 vented in his Annals of Philosophy for January, 1816. It suited 

 his temper then, to advocate Sir H. Davy's claims: for the con- 

 troversy about the miner's safe-lamp, was yet in embryo. 



From his answer, he appears to deny that the sun and fixed stars 

 are masses of light, or that the cause of light is condensed in their 

 discs ; because in his System, he had affirmed of light, that 

 '' the third, and not the least singular of its peculiar properties, 

 is, that its particles are never found cohering together, so as to 

 form masses of any sensible magnitude." The atmosphere, 

 electricity, and caloric, have also this peculiar property. 



•' I ani accused of having perverted Davy's account of chlo- 



riodic acid, to suit my own atomic notionst." By accident, the 



detail of his perversion was left out of our Review. AVe here 



insert it from the original manuscript for the Dr's. edification. 



* Journal of SJcicncc XI., 153. f Answer, p. 259. 



